4

Canada's Secret Forces Are Great at Murdering Terrorists

Getty

3

The Vietnamese Had a Killer Air Force

Getty

Thanks to Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick, and your granddad's night terrors, we all have a pretty good idea of what the Vietnam War looked like. There were lots of guys wading through rice paddies, tramping through the jungle, running to choppers, and passing doobies. And we might have won if not for those pesky jungle fighters, the primitive Viet Cong, armed with nothing but AK-47s and crude booby traps.

The Reality

Sure, much of the Vietnam War was fought in the muck, but a whole damn lot of it was fought in the air ... where the Vietnamese were really, really good.

So good, in fact, that the real-world training program portrayed in Top Gun was started to deal with the Vietnamese Air Force. Not the Nazis. Not the Soviets. The Vietnamese. Which is especially impressive considering that they didn't form their first squadron until 1964. By 1965, Vietnamese planes had claimed their first victory -- one that pitted eight Russian-built MiGs against 79 American planes. And the clunky MiGs shot down two F-105s. And that was before the Vietnamese got slick new MiG-21s from Uncle Brezhnev.

2

Brazilian Police Are Urban Warfare Specialists

Antonio Scorza / Getty

There's a lot more to Brazil than just soccer, bikini waxes, and Carnivale. For example, slums. The poorest shanty towns, known as favelas, are home to 11 million people and very few city services. And what residents lack in running water, toilets, electricity, and access to food they make up for with drug lords and one of the world's highest crime rates.

Eleicoes 2008

So one could go from thinking of Brazil as a year-round Mardi Gras to picturing it as a lawless hellhole -- especially if you've played the Favela level in Modern Warfare 2. Shit, you know things have gone south when your town gets its own FPS multiplayer map.

The Reality

The Brazilian police are really serious about keeping Brazil's poorest neighborhoods from becoming a real-life violent video game. While your local neighborhood cop drives around a shitty Crown Vic, Brazilian forces drive around in fucking tanks:

The Brigade

1

The African Union Did What Nobody Else Could: Cleaned Up Somalia

AFP / Getty

Africa is a big place. Assuming that the whole continent is in a constant state of any one bad thing is like assuming that all Americans wear cowboy hats and play for the NBA. Focus in on Somalia, on the other hand, and most of us have a pretty specific picture of life on the ground. Pirates! Warlords! Drought conditions! Anarchy! It's like Mad Max or, well, any Hollywood movie set in Africa.

AFP / Getty

Conditions are so bad in Somalia that both the U.N. and the U.S. have been unable to help ... twice. If only someone would come along to clean up the mess.

The Reality

Someone has come along -- someone called Africa. Specifically, the peacekeeping arm of the African Union.

Sia Kambou / Getty

You could fill a library with books, diagrams, and Web comics trying to explain the situation in Somalia, but in a nutshell, the country suffered under the control of warlords, thugs, and ne'er-do-wells for most of the 1990s. Between 1992 and 1993, the U.N. and the U.S. tried to step up to the plate and get bellies fed. You probably remember the results of their efforts in the form of Black Hawk Down and footage of American bodies getting dragged through Mogadishu. It was not a good time. By the mid-2000s, a new group of al-Qaida extremists were in charge of Mogadishu and people were starving again.

But this time around, the U.N. and U.S. helped through the brand new African Union, a federation of 54 African states created to confront AIDS, malaria, drought, and bad guys running lawless states. Beginning in 2007, troops from Burundi, Nigeria, Malawi, and Uganda pledged to help out, while Tanzania offered to train newly formed Somali troops. It took a while, but within four years, the A.U. kicked the bad guys out of Mogadishu and are now in the process of driving them out of Somalia altogether.

AFP / Getty

This wasn't the only success of A.U. forces, either. They staged an Omaha Beach-style invasion of Anjouan Island in 2008, sending rebel leader Mohamed Bacar off the island and fleeing for his life. They were also the only peacekeeping troops in Darfur until 2007, when the U.N. finally got involved. Hell, why can't Bono raise money for these guys?

For more countries we wouldn't want to screw around with, check out 6 National Anthems That Will Make You Tremble With Fear and Fun Size Countries: The Insane Histories of the World's 6 Tiniest Nations.

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out 4 Works of Propaganda That Prove Dictators Suck at Photoshop.

And stop by LinkSTORM to learn why you should probably stay away from Mounties also.

Do you have an idea in mind that would make a great article? Then sign up RIGHT NOW and pitch your first article today! Do you possess expert skills in image creation and manipulation? Mediocre? Even rudimentary? Are you frightened by MS Paint and simply have a funny idea? You can create an infographic and you could be on the front page of Cracked.com tomorrow!

And don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to get sexy, sexy jokes sent straight to your news feed. Are you on Google+? So are we!